Noomi Rapace's thrilling performance makes her the real star of The Girl With
The Dragon Tattoo.

Oh Sweden! The crisp cheekbones of its citizenry, the avant knitwear designed by its fashionable youth, the gorgeous melancholy of its nouveau-Balearica bands, its passion for social democracy: it really is a wonderful country. And then there are its crime novelists. Henning Mankell, Hakan Nesser, Mari Jungstedt and, perhaps greatest of all (though he died at an early age in 2004), Stieg Larsson: these thriller writers offer stories stripped bare of cliches, in touch with a sadness as deep as icebergs, and that aren’t afraid to tackle state-of-the-nation themes.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, whose original and more potent title was Men Who Hate Women, begins with Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), an investigative journalist dedicated to exposing corporate crime, facing jail for libelling a wealthy tycoon. Unexpectedly, he gets a call from aristocratic industrialist Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube) and is summoned to a palatial rural residence to be told about the murder of the old man’s niece Harriet (Ewa Froling) in the mid-1960s. Her body was never found and no one was ever prosecuted: can Blomkvist help?

Real help comes in the form of an androgynous, bisexual, computer-hacking twenty-something called Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace). She’s a walking mystery; tense, tiny, apt to get into fights. She’s also, for reasons that aren’t clear at first, financially reliant on a brute of a guardian. Sharing a hatred for the old men whose ruthless, money-grabbing grip on power gives the lie to the fiction of Sweden as a utopian state, the odd couple embarks upon a long and mostly gripping campaign to uncover the mystery behind Harriet’s disappearance.

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Rapace is the real star of the film, carrying the action and compelling our attention much more than Nyqvist’s passive (literally so, as is shown in one head-scratchingly funny sex scene) and rather inhibited character. She’s never more dangerous than when she’s under attack, lashing out with a bottle at youths who attack her in a subway, exacting artful revenge against one of the bastards who exploits her. Something has happened to her – something that Larsson explains to readers in subsequent volumes of the “Millennium trilogy” – that makes it unclear whether or not she’s suffering from Aspergers syndrome. What’s going on in her head is the film’s real mystery.

Racism, patriarchal misogyny, globalization: director Niels Arden Opley gives all these hefty themes their due in this largely faithful adaptation that short-changes its source text only in the limited attention it pays to Blomkvist’s long-standing affair with a fellow journalist at his magazine. When it comes to pointing the finger of blame at modern-day Sweden, it turns out that the culprits are individuals as much as they are economic or political systems: the bad guys, unquantifiably more wicked than anyone could have imagined, represent a blue-blooded clan that, rather like the Winshaw family in Jonathan Coe’s novel What A Carve Up!, has been poisoning Swedish society for many decades.

If that makes this drama, scripted by Nikolaj Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg, feel a little synoptic, like the kind of twisty and rather twisted saga you might expect to see on television, that’s probably because it’s been constructed from material shot for two television movies. All of which means, in spite of its dark subject matter, it tweaks and extends the thriller genre to less startling or mysterious effect than another Swedish film, Let The Right One In, did to the vampire-genre flick.

Still, the wintry photography is consistently atmospheric, the sense of cultural scabs being picked at interesting, and Rapace’s performance altogether more thrilling than any that can be imagined from Kristen Stewart, Natalie Portman or any of the mooted co-leads in the promised Hollywood remake.